A large convoy of trucks carrying aid was “violently looted” in the Gaza Strip over the weekend and its drivers forced at gunpoint to unload supplies, the main United Nations agency that helps Palestinians said on Monday, calling it one of the worst such incidents of the war.

The agency, known as UNRWA, said in a statement on Monday that the convoy of 109 trucks had been driving from the Kerem Shalom border crossing in southern Gaza when it was looted on Saturday. Most of the trucks were lost, some of the drivers were reportedly shot, and some vehicles sustained extensive damage, the agency said.

Only 11 trucks made it to their destination, said Louise Wateridge, an UNRWA spokeswoman currently in Gaza. Attackers shot the trucks’ tires out in order to stop and loot some of the vehicles, she said, and the agency is still waiting to hear how many casualties there were, and what types of injuries convoy members sustained.

The incident highlighted the difficulties aid workers face bringing aid into Gaza, despite months of attempts to help it arrive safely. The need is urgent. Earlier this month, a U.N.-backed panel said that all of Gaza faced a risk of famine between now and April, with the north at particular risk.

“People at the moment are absolutely desperate for anything,” Ms. Wateridge said. “We’re back at a stage where we’re seeing people literally fighting over a bag of flour.”

She said: “Israeli authorities continue to restrict a huge amount of the humanitarian response. Everything here is being strangled — food, flour, water — everything.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the episode. It was not clear who was responsible for the looting. In the past, Israel has accused Hamas militants of robbing aid convoys to supply their own forces. Hamas also did not respond to a request for comment.

The convoy had been scheduled to enter Gaza on Sunday, but the Israeli military instructed it to leave a day earlier “at short notice via an alternate, unfamiliar route,” he U.N. agency said.

Ms. Wateridge told The New York Times that her agency was instructed a day before the scheduled transport that the convoy had to leave within 30 minutes — a huge logistical risk for drivers, who had little mobile data access to plan for the new routes safely.

Aid agencies have said for months that woefully inadequate food supplies have led to looting, hoarding and profiteering, exacerbating the shortages, and that the only solution is a dramatic increase in deliveries.

UNRWA said that the frequent looting of humanitarian aid convoys was also in part a result of the collapse of law and order in wartime Gaza, the growing desperation among Palestinians there and the policies of the Israeli authorities, who it said “continue to disregard their legal obligations under international law” to ensure that sufficient aid safely reached Palestinians in the territory.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza has continued to deteriorate in the 14th month of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas, which attacked southern Israel in October 2023.

Official Israeli government figures this month showed that Israel, which controls all the crossings into Gaza, was letting significantly less food and fewer supplies into the territory than in earlier months, even as a 30-day deadline set by the Biden administration passed without a substantial improvement in conditions there.

Israeli officials have denied creating obstacles to aid deliveries. They have accused aid agencies of failing to distribute the aid that it has allowed into Gaza, and have said that raids on aid trucks by Palestinians have prevented proper distribution.

The threat of looting and attacks by armed gangs has hindered relief groups from delivering assistance in southern Gaza. The Israeli campaign in Gaza toppled much of the Hamas government, and there is no civilian administration to take its place.

Since Israel went to war in Gaza against Hamas, vowing to wipe out the group, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resisted both domestic and international pressure to devise a postwar governance plan for the enclave to help fill the resulting void.

In a speech on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said that while Israeli operations in Gaza had “eradicated a significant portion of Hamas’s military capabilities,” he has now asked the Israeli military to propose a plan to eliminate the group’s ability to govern, as well.

Such a plan “also relates to eliminating their capability to distribute food, distribute humanitarian aid,” he said. “We would like to ensure humanitarian aid distribution that would not be looted by Hamas and others.”

In much of Gaza, there are no police officers to prevent chaos as organized crime groups fill the vacuum. Their affiliations — whether with Gazan clans or armed groups like Hamas — are unclear.

Ms. Wateridge said Israel’s current restrictions have made it extremely difficult for aid agencies to oversee and track the distribution of aid, or to assess who is behind the looting of their convoys.

The Israeli authorities do not allow the agency to use its own trucks and drivers to deliver aid within Gaza, which means it must contract for them inside the territory and transfer the cargo. That often leaves UNRWA with shaky information about where different supplies are within a convoy and how many vehicles there are.

Aid workers must rely on the contractors to inform them of what is happening, as was the case on Saturday when the trucks were attacked. To the best of the agency’s knowledge, Ms. Wateridge said, the attackers not only looted the aid but even took the trucks’ fuel and batteries.

Humanitarian convoys, Ms. Wateridge said, are not allowed to have armed guards. They rely on massive metal grills and armor placed around the cab of the truck to protect the driver.

“It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie,” she said. “They try and armor the vehicles as best as possible and protect themselves. And they drive very, very fast and just try and try and not stop and just keep going. That’s the only protection they have.”

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

The typically congested streets of Beirut were unusually empty on Monday. Schools that had temporarily shuttered earlier this fall when war first escalated were closed again. Many people who had come back to Lebanon’s capital after fleeing to the northern mountains a month ago had headed north once more.

Since Israeli airstrikes hit two neighborhoods within Beirut on Sunday and another on Monday evening, a sense of disbelief and frustration has washed over the city. In recent weeks, the initial shock of the intensified war between Hezbollah and Israel had given way to a feeling that relative safety had returned to Beirut, as the pace of strikes slowed and the city center remained largely unscathed.

Now that tenuous sense of security has once again been shattered — and a city already weary from two months of war is coming to grips with yet another escalation of violence.

“There is no security anymore,” said Hussein Zahwi, 49. “There is no security at all.”

On Monday morning, Mr. Zahwi stood across from one of the buildings hit in the Mar Elias neighborhood the day before. Wisps of smoke were still wafting from its shattered store windows. The strikes ignited a large fire that burned through the night and blackened the facade of the building. An acrid smell hung in the air. The strikes on Sunday killed at least six people and injured around two dozen more, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the strikes.

Mr. Zahwi had rented an apartment on the third floor of the building with his wife and three children weeks earlier, after Israeli airstrikes began raining down near his home in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The cramped collection of neighborhoods there, known as the Dahiya, is in effect governed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group and political party in Lebanon that is at war with Israel.

His three children were shaken but not injured when the strikes tore through the building in Mar Elias on Sunday evening, Mr. Zahwi said. But now, with the Dahiya still too dangerous to return to, he was at a loss for where his family might go, and wondered if anywhere was really safe.

“Before I was in Dahiya, now I’m here,” he said. “The question is: Where can I go next?”

Those fears were amplified on Monday evening when another airstrike hit the Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood — the third blast in the city in two days. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that at least five people had been killed and 24 others wounded in the strike, which damaged the ground floor of a building and sent plumes of smoke into the city’s skyline.

Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel last October in support of Hamas and its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, igniting a year of cross-border strikes. That simmering conflict escalated this fall, after Israel detonated pagers and walkie-talkies distributed to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, assassinated the group’s leader and launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon. Israeli officials say the airstrikes and ground invasion are targeting Hezbollah’s leaders and military facilities in Lebanon, which are often embedded within residential areas.

Israel appeared to ease the pace of air attacks around Beirut in late October, after American officials said they opposed the scope of its strikes in the capital. But in recent days, the strikes have roared back. The attacks on Sunday were the first within Beirut’s city limits in about a month.

Over the past week, Israel has unleashed its most intense bombardment yet of the Dahiya, hitting the area day and night. In the south, Israeli forces appear to be making incursions deeper into Lebanon, moving beyond border villages that have been left in ruins.

Hezbollah said on Monday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli forces near Khiam, a large town in southern Lebanon that Israeli troops have been pushing toward in recent days. Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported heavy airstrikes on the town and the surrounding area.

Israel’s intensified push appears aimed at pressuring Hezbollah to accept the terms of a cease-fire plan devised by Israeli and American officials, analysts say. Amos Hochstein, a White House envoy, is expected in Beirut this week for talks on that proposal, according to Lebanese officials.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing Parliament on Monday, said that the goal was to prevent Hezbollah from rearming itself and that Israeli military operations in Lebanon had been “exceptionally fruitful.”

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said on Monday that Lebanon’s initial response to the U.S. plan was “positive,” but that some points still required discussion. In an interview with Al Araby TV, a Qatar-based broadcaster, Mr. Mikati said that he hoped Mr. Hochstein’s visit would allow for the points to be “resolved face to face.”

In Lebanon, the recent escalation has stoked concerns that Israel may have been emboldened by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, whose nominees for key diplomatic positions have signaled fervent support for Israel.

As the conflict has intensified, so too has the simmering resentment among Lebanese who do not support Hezbollah and feel dragged into a war that is not theirs. Even some who support Hezbollah have voiced frustration, suggesting that the group — the real power underpinning the state in Lebanon — has not delivered on its promise of deterrence and protection against Israel.

The fresh barrage of Israeli airstrikes has offered brutal, daily reminders of just how fragile any sense of security is in Lebanon, a country that has careened from crisis to crisis for decades.

“I lived through the civil war,” said Jamal Sharaf, 67, referring to the country’s bloody, 15-year civil conflict. “The destruction now feels much, much worse.”

As he spoke, Mr. Sharaf looked at the smoldering remains of his bookstore, which was on the ground floor of the building struck in Mar Elias on Sunday. He opened the store, Sharaf Library, 30 years ago and had spent nearly every day since amid its stacks of notebooks, stationery and calendars.

His daughter, Noura Sharaf, 33, stood beside him, gently touching his arm. She described Sunday as “a simply cursed day.” The trouble began in the early afternoon when an airstrike destroyed a seven-story building one street away from their family home in the Ras al-Naba neighborhood. The strike shook their apartment, she said.

Her father returned home from the bookstore, and two hours later, around 8 p.m., a strike tore through his shop. “Imagine if it was a weekday — the shop would have still been open, he would have been there,” Ms. Sharaf said, tears welling in her eyes.

Mr. Sharaf said he could not even begin to contemplate resurrecting the store. He did not have the savings to rebuild it. The Lebanese government, crippled by years of political paralysis and economic crisis, was not expected to step in. And while Hezbollah led a multimillion-dollar reconstruction effort after its monthlong 2006 war with Israel, the group has not indicated that any similar plan is on the table this time around.

“Where is the government? We pay our taxes, we do our duties, we pay our bills, but where are they now?” Mr. Sharaf said. “Its regular people here are paying the price” for the war, he added.

Few in the crowd in Mar Elias on Monday seemed optimistic about the prospects of a cease-fire. Mustafa Muhammad Mosleh, 84, said that even if a truce were reached, the real test for the country — already reeling from crises and deeply divided along sectarian lines — would be what came after the fighting ends.

“Those who are fighting will reach a deal, reconcile and then act as if nothing happened,” Mr. Mosleh said, referring to Hezbollah. “But people are dying. The country is broken.”

Euan Ward contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.

Ukraine signaled a new sense of urgency on Monday following a decision by the Biden administration to allow long-range strikes inside Russia using American-provided missiles, with Ukrainian politicians suggesting that the first launches would come soon and without warning.

With two months left in his administration, President Biden finally relented after months of pleas from Ukraine that it needed to fire at targets deeper inside Russia to more effectively degrade Moscow’s forces.

But hanging over Ukraine’s newfound freedom to attempt deeper strikes was the impending ascent of President-elect Donald J. Trump to the White House in January. It is unclear how much of the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine will survive once Mr. Trump takes office, including this most recent shift.

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It was not just Gisèle Pelicot’s life that collapsed the day the police delivered the news that they believed that her husband of 50 years had been drugging her and inviting other men into their house to rape her alongside him for almost a decade.

“It was the whole family,” their eldest son, David, told a court Monday, in a dramatic day when the couple’s three children addressed their father, who was sitting in a box on the edge of the packed courtroom in Avignon, France.

“You need to know this trial is a trial of a devastated family,” David said.

David Pelicot, 50, is haunted by fears that his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, was also abused by his grandfather. His sister, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is a shadow of her former self, convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by their father. (Their father denies both those charges.) The youngest sibling, Florian, took the stand to say that his marriage had collapsed.

“It cost me a divorce and thousands of questions,” said Florian Pelicot, 38.

He added, in anguish, “How do we rebuild ourselves? What’s the method? How do we do it?”

Some 51 men are on trial, mostly for accusations of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pelicot. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to crushing sleeping pills into her food and drinks for almost a decade, and then inviting dozens of other men he met online into their home to rape her alongside him while she was unconscious.

At least a dozen of the men, including Mr. Pelicot, have pleaded guilty. The rest have admitted that they had sexual relations with Ms. Pelicot, but say they did not intend to rape her. Instead, many have argued that they believed that Ms. Pelicot had consented and that they had been lured by Mr. Pelicot with the promise of a threesome, in which Ms. Pelicot was pretending to sleep as part of the couple’s fantasy.

Some said they believe Mr. Pelicot had drugged them also.

Mr. Pelicot repeatedly has said that all the accused knew he had drugged his former wife without her knowledge, and that he drugged no one but his wife.

The trial, now in its third month, has shaken France and has raised uncomfortable questions about relations between men and women, the prevalence of rape and conceptions of consent. In a country that showed resistance to the #MeToo movement seven years ago, conversations about rape culture and toxic masculinity have suddenly become common.

Ms. Pelicot, 71, has emerged as a feminist hero, after making the rare decision to waive her right to private trial and insist it all be public — including the graphic photos and videos her husband took of the sexual interactions while she was drugged.

She did so, she told the court, hoping it would help other victims and “change society.”

Each day, crowds line up to watch the trial in an overflow room and burst into applause when Ms. Pelicot passes by.

But it has all come at a great cost. Ms. Pelicot told the court that her life was a “field of ruins.” On Monday, the court heard how the case had destroyed the lives of their three children and their own nuclear families, as well as the conception they had of themselves and their family.

Before Mr. Pelicot was taken into police custody in November 2020 on accusations of raping his wife, the family had been very close, spending vacations together, often at the house the couple had rented for their retirement in southern France. David Pelicot, a sales manager for a Champagne company, said he had shared a passion for soccer, tennis and moviegoing with his father. He described the magical surprise birthday parties his parents had planned for him and his siblings, to the delight and envy of all their friends.

“I lost and I have the feeling today, all my childhood has disappeared. It was erased,” he said. Now, his hope was “above all, in the future we can erase, make disappear in our heads, the man who is to the left,” he said, pointing to his father in the box.

Since then, the Pelicot children say, they’ve all been haunted by what they did not see and by what might have happened to them and their own children, who spent a lot of time with their grandfather. The court heard that a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Pelicot abused his grandchildren is ongoing.

Ms. Darian told the court again on Monday that she is convinced the father she had always considered loving and supportive had drugged and sexually assaulted her too.

The police found evidence of photos of her among her father’s collection, including two of her sleeping at night in an awkward position, with the lights on.

“I was sedated to be abused by Dominique, it was not a hypothesis. It’s a reality I know,” said Ms. Darian, who created the pen name after the accusations against her father. When the photos were taken, she said, “you weren’t looking at me the way a father looks at his daughter, but in an incestuous way.”

Ms. Darian has tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, Don’t Put Me to Sleep, to publicize the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes, and writing a book, “And I Stopped Calling You Papa,” detailing the horrors.

She was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward soon after the police took her father into custody and showed her the photos they had found. Part way through the trial, she announced on Instagram that she was checking herself into a clinic for a few days “to recover all my energy, to be able to sleep again.”

She told the court that she felt like the forgotten victim in the trial, and that very few victims who were drugged in order to be abused have proof as her mother does.

She hoped the trial would help change that and vowed to keep working toward it.

“It’s not only the trial of Gisèle Pelicot. It’s the trial of the whole family. It’s the trial of drugging victims in France,” she said.

On Monday, her two brothers confronted their father directly, asking him again if he had sexually abused their sister or their children.

“If you still have a bit of humanity, tell us what you did to my son and my sister,” David said.

“Nothing of any kind,” Mr. Pelicot shouted from his box.

“I maintain and hope, even if I am no longer here, one day you will have the proof that nothing happened,” he told his son once he was given a microphone.

Then, in the most formal French, he asked to be forgiven.

“Please accept my apologies for what I did,” he said.

The response from David was angry and final: “Never.”

President Biden began what is likely to be his last summit with global leaders as commander in chief on Monday, pushing for even stronger support of Ukraine despite the looming uncertainty of how President-elect Donald J. Trump might undo his efforts.

Just before the Group of 20 summit began in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Biden authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.

The decision reflected a sense of urgency to cement Mr. Biden’s legacy on one of his presidency’s biggest foreign policy challenges. Mr. Biden and his aides are in a race against time as they seek to bolster Ukraine before Mr. Trump — who has been highly critical of aid to Ukraine — takes power.

At the start of the G20 summit on Monday, Mr. Biden used one of his final moments on the global stage to encourage more world leaders to assist Ukraine.

“The United States strongly supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Mr. Biden said during an event on hunger and poverty with world leaders including Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. “Everyone around this table in my view should as well.”

But while Mr. Biden’s authorization of long-range weapons may help Ukrainian troops under fire in western Russia in the short-term, his decision was unlikely to change the trajectory of the war, according to American officials and military analysts.

The Ukrainian military now has a limited supply of the missiles. Firing a small number at targets in Russia would not make much of a difference to the overall war, analysts said.

But the missiles, known as ATACMS, could serve as a deterrent, discouraging North Korea from further assisting Russia.

“These ATACMS aren’t going to turn the tide of battle in Kursk,” John J. Sullivan, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Trump and Biden administrations, said on Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

As Mr. Biden slowly deliberated the decision over the long-range weapons, Russia was also preparing.

Russia has moved most of its attack planes that fire long-range missiles and drop bombs to locations outside the range of the U.S.-supplied weapons, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials.

The decision to allow the use of long-range strikes inside Russia stood in contrast to the more cautious approach Mr. Biden has taken on the war up to now.

Since the war started more than two years ago, Mr. Biden has sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to help repel Russia, but repeatedly hesitated when it came to offensive weapons, worried about provoking a wider conflict.

Several Republican lawmakers and some Democrats had been calling on Mr. Biden to give Ukraine broader latitude to use them.

“Should he have done it before? Absolutely,” said William B. Taylor Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “It’s taken far too long for this decision to come. But I hope it’s not too late.”

The decision, he added, marks a pivotal point in Mr. Biden’s support for Ukraine.

“The Biden administration recognizes they’ve got a limited amount of time to have an effect,” said Mr. Taylor, vice president for Europe and Russia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “This is what Biden will be remembered for: If he gave the Ukrainians everything possible to allow them to win.”

A Slow Deliberation

Mr. Biden’s aides have said in the past that rallying allies to support Ukraine in the weeks after Russia’s invasion is among the prouder efforts of his presidency. His timely warnings that Mr. Putin was poised to invade also won him lasting appreciation in Ukraine, even as European nations and even Ukraine’s government remained skeptical that an all-out war was coming.

But as the war ground on and the casualties mounted, views among Ukrainians hardened on Mr. Biden and his deliberative decision-making process. Ukrainians felt they were left in a long, cruel limbo with too few weapons to win the war and a lack of a diplomatic strategy to end the fighting.

The White House has stressed its commitment to Ukraine, while also weighing concerns in the American intelligence community that Russian retaliation for authorizing long-range strikes would outweigh the benefits.

But the recruitment of North Korean troops to help Russia in recent weeks has alarmed the administration and Mr. Biden’s decision also came the same day that Russia bombarded Ukraine’s power grid in one of the war’s largest attacks.

Jon Finer, Mr. Biden’s deputy national security adviser, declined to confirm the authorization of the long-range missiles on Monday, but noted that the United States had said it would respond to Russia’s decision to escalate attacks on Ukraine with North Korean reinforcements.

“If there are circumstances that evolve and change, you know, we will evolve and change to meet them and to allow the Ukrainians to continue to defend their territory and their sovereignty,” Mr. Finer said during a news briefing on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

Beside authorizing the long-range strikes, the Biden administration has been trying to move more quickly to provide military equipment and financial assistance for Ukraine already approved by Congress.

Writing in the sand

Despite the last-ditch scramble, it was clear at the G20 summit that Mr. Biden’s strategy in Ukraine, like his broader foreign and domestic policy vision, could soon be a thing of the past.

The move to empower Ukraine to attack deeper within Russia came in Mr. Biden’s final months in office, and was made with full awareness that U.S. foreign policy could soon be overhauled once Mr. Trump is in the White House.

While Mr. Biden has centered his presidency on defending U.S. allies, world leaders are well aware that Mr. Trump campaigned on an “America First” isolationist approach and has accused other nations of not contributing enough to security alliances.

Mr. Trump has also been deeply skeptical of U.S. aid to Ukraine and argued that its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, should have cut a deal and made concessions to Russia.

Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is undoubtedly hanging over the meeting in Rio, said Josh Lipsky, the senior director for the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

“Even before the election, for the past year this outcome was on every leader’s mind,” Mr. Lipsky said. “The primary focus for the U.S. is to show the rest of the world that this forum matters and the U.S. will remain engaged.”

World leaders are moving on

Mr. Biden’s Latin America trip, which included a summit in Peru and a tour of the Amazon, amounted to one last diplomatic push of his foreign policy agenda — even as many of the participants shifted focus. Some of the world leaders who met with Mr. Biden during his diplomatic swan song seemed to already be looking to the next chapter.

“China is ready to work with the new U.S. administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping said at the beginning of his meeting with Mr. Biden in Peru.

The G20 summit also comes at a time when some U.S. allies, including Brazil itself, appear to be strengthening other global partnerships to offer a counterweight to the West, including the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which recently added Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates as members.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, planned to meet with Mr. Xi during the summit amid heightened competition between the U.S. and China for economic influence in regions like South America.

Mr. Biden acknowledged his lame-duck status during brief remarks in the Amazon rainforest on Sunday as he traveled from Lima, Peru to the G20 summit.

“It’s no secret, that I’m leaving office in January,” Mr. Biden said, declining to mention Mr. Trump by name. “I will leave my successor and my country a strong foundation to build on, if they choose to do so.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, Ana Ionova from Manaus, Brazil, Andrew Kramer from Kyiv and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

At long last, something to celebrate: People were saying that the Chef Warif restaurant, whose Syrian-style shawarma sandwiches were famous in Gaza City before the war, had reopened. Not in the city itself, which the war had reduced largely to rubble. And not the same quality of meat, which the restaurant’s owner now had to buy frozen and at steep prices from traders importing it to the Gaza Strip.

But it was shawarma, shawarma from home. Long lines formed this July as workers sawed the first slices of roasting beef or chicken off the spit and bundled it in flatbread with the restaurant’s signature garlic sauce.

Many of those in line were longtime customers who had fled Gaza City, in the north, for Deir al Balah, the city in central Gaza where Chef Warif had reopened. Living in tents or crammed shelters under smoky skies, their ears painfully accustomed to the thunder of Israeli airstrikes, they had been desperate for this — a normal moment.

“When I heard about Chef Warif, I jumped for joy,” said Naela al-Danaf, 40, a secretary at a local clinic who escaped Gaza City early in the war. It was a relief to see the owner standing there, she said, dishing out lunch like everything was fine.

In parts of Deir al Balah, once known for its restful olive and date palm groves, the trees are gone or have turned gray with ash and dirt, and the ground is slick with sewage. People look away from the rotting carcasses of horses and dogs. Once familiar buildings are piles of debris. Bombing can shatter the calm in a second. Though municipal trash pickup has started again in places, it often smells like a dumpster.

But in the center of town, people relax under shady trees, chatting with friends over coffee, freshly squeezed mango juice or avocado smoothies. Families crowd around Zain’s dessert stand or wait for juices from Karameesh, where fresh fruit dangles from the ceiling. Others head to the beach, a chance to watch the waves and get their children out of cramped shelters.

An olive press has been turning this season’s harvest — far smaller than usual, and picked as drones buzzed overhead — into golden-green oil. On Deir al Balah’s outskirts, a farmer has been planting his field with cabbage and winter greens. The grumbling of his tractor is a strange echo of what life was like before the war; strange, but welcome.

Every conflict has its pockets of ordinariness, places where life ticks on away from the bombs and the headlines. Israeli officials have been quick to highlight such scenes, posting photographs of well-stocked markets to suggest reports of shortages were overblown.

But not many wars are squeezed into a Las Vegas-size strip of land that has been bombed almost everywhere yet is almost impossible to flee. In a Gaza starving under a near-total Israeli siege, which has blocked all but a dribble of aid and commercial supplies, residents and aid workers say the little food for sale is hopelessly expensive.

Everyone seems to know someone who has been killed. Most of the survivors are living in miserable squalor. It is hard to imagine any escape.

And there isn’t, not in any sure sense. An airstrike could rip things apart at any time, or Israel’s military could order families to evacuate yet again before it starts another operation against Hamas, as it did in Deir al Balah in August.

But compared to the rest of Gaza, Deir al Balah has gone relatively unscathed, allowing the United Nations and aid groups to set up central offices there. A cautious rhythm has returned to the streets. Lunch, coffee, a stop for dessert: the more mundane, Gazans say, the more precious it seems.

Martyrs’ Street, the city’s longest thoroughfare, is lined with cafes, ice cream shops and eateries. Many are familiar to residents displaced from Gaza City, where the same business names once meant pleasure, a weekend treat or just a stop after work.

Their reappearance has been bittersweet. The more Gaza City stores open in Deir al Balah, the more permanent the displacement seems.

One of them is Shawarma Moaz, a Gaza City spot that reopened on Martyrs’ Street in March. Its manager, Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, said that customers have been joking to him, “Since you’re here, seems like all of us will be away from home even longer.”

Few can afford to go out. Most Gazans have no savings and little, if any, income. On Martyrs’ Street, a smoothie can cost $4 (twice the prewar price), a shawarma sandwich about $11 (nearly three times what it used to). A customer protest over the high price of meat shut down some restaurants for two days this month.

But some without the means to buy come by just to say hello, happy to see the street abuzz, business owners say.

At one cafe, Ayah Jweifel, 19, a second-year multimedia major at Al Aqsa University, was laughing and gossiping one recent afternoon with her sister, Shahd, 17. They were talking about plans, talking about anything but the fighting.

“I just have one goal, to forget that there are things like war, bombing and killing,” Ayah Jweifel said. “Seeing people around me who are laughing, smiling and having fun — it gives me hope that we can get our lives before Oct. 7 back.”

That day last year, Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, led raids on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel counterattacked, killing more than 40,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The war seemed distant at the cafe. The inside was spick-and-span, with a counter and floor of faux marble and a glass display case for pastries; outside, waiters served cappuccinos, dessert and water pipes to customers sitting around wooden tables. Lights were twirled around the trunks of olive and palm trees.

The contrast with the rest of Gaza, even with other parts of the city, could be called surreal. But what people really found surreal was the war itself. Meeting friends, drinking coffee — that was real life, they said, or what real life was supposed to be.

“We have to adapt to the situation,” Shahd Jweifel said. It had been her idea to get her sister and friends to meet up there once a week. “Here we feel like we’re just like everyone else in the rest of the world.”

Except they weren’t. In one corner of the cafe’s garden hung a whiteboard that aid workers had been using to train people to avoid the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza.

The Jweifel sisters had promised their family that they would leave for home before sunset, they said, since public order broke down months ago and it was safer not to move in the dark.

Carving out minutes of normalcy also means willfully forgetting what is happening elsewhere in Gaza.

“It’s like we’re lying to ourselves,” said Ms. al-Danaf, the clinic secretary from Gaza City. “We’re in a good place, but our hearts and minds are following the bad news from the north.”

Whenever she called Dareen, her daughter in northern Gaza, Ms. al-Danaf said, Dareen would ask, “What are you having for lunch today?” It was a lacerating, if unintended, reminder: While Ms. al-Danaf could get shawarma, she said, Dareen had almost nothing. Amid a new attack on northern Gaza beginning last month, Israel had restricted supplies there even further.

Feeling guilty, Ms. al-Danaf said that she sometimes lied, telling her daughter she was having potatoes or lentils.

After Shawarma Moaz’s team fled Gaza City, it took months to accept that they would not be returning anytime soon, and months more to scrape together enough to start over, the manager, Mr. Abu Karsh, said.

Nothing was easy. Equipment and a storefront took some creativity to find; they bought some items from people they thought had probably stolen things from destroyed restaurants, he said. A nearby airstrike damaged the solar panels they used for power.

For every business on Martyrs’ Street, covering costs is a struggle.

Chef Warif recently announced it was closing temporarily because frozen meat prices were so exorbitant.

But at least, Mr. Abu Karsh said, they had gotten part of their lives back.

“We’re not sitting in our tents,” he said, “mourning everything we lost.”

Intruders broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle last month and stole two vehicles, the police confirmed on Monday, a significant security breach at the sprawling royal estate west of London that is the primary residence of Prince William, his wife Catherine, and their three children.

William, the heir to the throne, and his family are believed to have been at home at the time of the burglary, according to The Sun, a London tabloid, which first reported the incident on Sunday. King Charles III and Queen Camilla also stay often at Windsor Castle, but were not there at the time.

A spokesman for the Thames Valley Police said they had received a report of a burglary on Crown Estate land shortly before midnight on Oct. 13. The intruders scaled a fence at Shaw Farm, an active farm located on the estate, according to The Sun.

“Offenders entered a farm building and made off with a black Isuzu pickup and a red quad bike,” the police spokesman said. “No arrests have been made at this stage and an investigation is ongoing.”

The Sun reported that after climbing over the six-foot fence to enter the grounds, the intruders used the truck, which had been stored in the barn, along with the bike, to crash through a farm gate on their way out. The gate is a five minutes’ drive from Adelaide Cottage, where William and Catherine live with their children, Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, 9, and Prince Louis, 6.

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William and Catherine have their offices, declined to comment on the incident, in keeping with their policy of not commenting on security issues.

There is no suggestion that the prince or his family were in direct danger. They have their own security at Adelaide Cottage, one of several residences on the 16,000 acre-Windsor estate that are used by members of the royal family.

It was the second major security breach at Windsor Castle in recent years, though not as serious as a previous one on Christmas Day in 2021, when the police confronted a man clad in black, wearing a metal face mask and wielding a crossbow. “I am here to kill the queen,” he told the officers.

The man, Jaswant Singh Chail, was sentenced to nine years in prison, after having been convicted of treason in February 2023. It was the first treason conviction in Britain in more than four decades.

Windsor Castle has been a refuge for William and especially Catherine, since she announced in March she had been diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer. While she has returned to occasional public duties, she has mostly convalesced at Adelaide Cottage, where the couple moved in 2022 from Kensington Palace because they felt it was a more private place to raise their family.

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, also lived on the Windsor estate, in Frogmore Cottage, until the king asked them to vacate the house in 2023 after their bitter public rift with the royal family.

Harry has been engaged in a prolonged legal battle with the British government over security for himself and his family since he moved to Southern California. He has said the loss of police protection during his visits to Britain has made it impossible for him to bring his two children to visit the royal family.

There has also been tension between the king and his younger brother, Prince Andrew, over another residence near Windsor Castle, Royal Lodge. Andrew has lived in the house for decades, but he has struggled to afford the upkeep since he was sent into internal exile after a scandal over his links to the convicted financier and sex predator, Jeffrey Epstein.

From inside a sweltering Tocorón prison on Sunday, the detained peered out at their anguished relatives, throwing kisses from small windows and yelling “Soon!”

Nearly three months after Venezuela’s authoritarian government arrested roughly 2,000 people in a crackdown following a disputed presidential election, officials have announced plans to release more than 200 prisoners.

By Sunday, at least 131 people had been freed, according to Foro Penal, a local watchdog group. Some analysts viewed the mass release, in part, as a gesture by the government to gain something from the incoming Trump administration.

But the announcement left another 1,800 or so families in a state of anguished limbo, hoping their sons, daughters, siblings, husbands and wives would also be among those let go. Over the weekend, hundreds of people gathered outside Tocorón, a prison two hours from Caracas, hoping to see their loved ones emerge.

Just a few weeks ago, the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, had bragged about packing Tocorón with his political opponents, who he called “fascist criminals.”

The government has charged most of them with terrorism, an accusation that has become a common way to target political foes. Many of the imprisoned have denied the charges, with their families telling The New York Times that their relatives had not committed any crimes.

Belkys Altuve, 59, was among those waiting in a blinding sun. Two of her sons and two of her grandchildren, all in their 20s, had been locked up since July 28, she said, and were charged with terrorism after they left the house in search of food and drinks for a birthday party.

That day was Election Day and Ms. Altuve had cast a vote for Mr. Maduro, whose movement has run the country for a generation. She had believed in his call for a socialist revolution, she said.

Now, “I feel like they betrayed me by taking my children away from me,” she said.

As of late Sunday, her children and grandchildren remained in custody.

For years, crackdowns in Venezuela have been accompanied by small reprieves, like prisoner releases, a cycle that has worn hearts and minds thin.

Tamara Taraciuk Broner, an expert on Venezuela for the Inter-American Dialogue, a research organization in Washington, said prisoner releases were almost always connected to a political goal.

In this case, she added, Mr. Maduro might be trying to communicate to President-elect Donald J. Trump that he is willing to ease up on human rights violations in exchange for favorable treatment.

In his first term, Mr. Trump imposed harsh measures, including stiff economic sanctions, meant to try to oust the Venezuelan leader.

The Maduro government is “clearly more afraid” of punitive measures under the Trump administration than under President Biden said Ms. Taraciuk Broner. “They want to show that they would be willing to negotiate.”

Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney general, told The Times that those who remained in detention were being held because they were being charged with serious crimes “and it is feared that they may evade prosecution.”

He added, in a text message, that his office “has not received any complaints of human rights violations during the protests, nor during the arrests.”

The release comes just days after the death of Jesús Manuel Martínez, an opposition organizer with Type 2 diabetes and cardiac problems who died in government detention. Opposition leaders have accused the government of denying him proper medical care, though Mr. Saab said he had been hospitalized since October.

The terrorism charges carry a sentence of up to 30 years, said Martha Tineo, a Venezuela human rights lawyer. The released prisoners have not been cleared of their charges, and will still have to fight their cases in court.

Outside Tocorón, many people said they had come from hours away, and several wore T-shirts bearing the faces of their imprisoned loved ones framed by a Venezuelan flag.

Yajaira Gutiérrez, 44, said she, too, had voted for Mr. Maduro on July 28. Her son, age 21, had not voted at all, she said. But on Aug. 7, he was taken from their home shortly after midnight. He has also been charged with terrorism.

“It doesn’t seem fair that I have given everything for him,” Ms. Gutiérrez said of Mr. Maduro, “and they have punished me like this.”

The July vote pitted Mr. Maduro against Edmundo González, a diplomat who had the backing of the country’s popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

Mr. Maduro, who has a long history of rigging elections in his favor, declared victory almost as soon as polls closed, but has not released tally sheets to back up that claim.

In response, the González-Machado movement collected tally sheets from more than 80 percent of polling stations, posting them online and asserting that receipts showed Mr. González had won almost 70 percent of the vote.

The United States and other nations have recognized Mr. González as the election’s legitimate winner, while independent monitors have said Mr. Maduro’s declaration is not credible.

The government crackdown began just as voting ended on July 28, with Mr. Maduro encouraging people to report neighbors who expressed disloyalty and the police setting up checkpoints in some neighborhoods and reviewing telephones for signs of opposition support.

While the Maduro government has always gone after opposition organizers, particularly prominent leaders, it has never detained so many people who have such limited connection to politics for so long.

Luis Mata, 25, from the Venezuelan island of Margarita, was among those released from Tocorón over the weekend. He is a human-rights activist, he said, and had been detained once before, for nine days in 2017 amid anti-Maduro protests.

This time around, he said, he was forced to strip naked, called a terrorist and beaten on the neck after entering the prison, he said. During his stay, he shared a cell with a half-dozen others and was given rotten meat to eat and contaminated water to drink.

He was detained with 47 others from Margarita island and was one of just eight who were released, he said. And so the day after his release, he returned to the prison to see if others from Margarita would be set free.

Many of those waiting outside Tocorón were scared to speak, fearful that it would lead to retaliation. Mr. Mata said he was not.

“You’ve already imprisoned me,” he said, addressing the government. “You’ve already tortured me. What else do you want? What else do you want from me? What else do you want from us? To shut us up? You will not be able to shut us up, because our call for freedom will always rise up.”

She galvanized a nation to oust Venezuela’s autocrat at the ballot box, spending months surrounded by people and filling avenues with supporters who risked beatings and arrest just to hear her speak.

Now, with President Nicolás Maduro accused of stealing the election and his government threatening her capture, María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s wildly popular opposition leader, has gone into hiding — alone.

In a series of rare, in-depth virtual interviews since she mobilized millions to vote against Mr. Maduro in July, Ms. Machado said she was holed up in a secret location somewhere inside her country. Because anyone who helps her could be detained — or might lead government agents to her — she said she has not had a visitor in months.

Nicknamed the country’s “Iron Lady” for her conservative politics and steely resolve, Ms. Machado is, she admitted, “longing for a hug.”

Her mother has urged her to meditate. She has not.

Instead, the former lawmaker is working around the clock, taking virtual meetings with foreign ministers and human rights organizations, urging them to remember that a broad coalition of nations acknowledge that her chosen candidate, Edmundo González, won the July vote by a wide margin and should be taking office in January.

Just hours after the election, Mr. Maduro declared victory, but he released no evidence to back up his claim. In response, the Machado team collected and published vote-tally receipts from more than 80 percent of polling stations.

The tallies, they said, showed that Mr. González had garnered almost 70 percent of the vote. (Fearing for his freedom, Mr. González, 75, fled to Spain in September.)

Ms. Machado argued that Venezuela now offers something extremely tempting to President-elect Donald J. Trump: “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term.”

In her view, Mr. Maduro is now so weak — rejected by his own people, suffering fractures within his party — that a renewed pressure campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies could in fact push the Venezuelan autocrat to negotiate his own exit.

This pressure campaign, she said, could include reversing the sanctions relief put in place by Mr. Biden and the pursuit of new criminal charges against Mr. Maduro’s allies.

She praised Mr. Trump’s selection of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state, and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida for national security adviser, positions that will be key in defining U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

Mr. Rubio, whom Ms. Machado has known for more than a decade, has staked his political career in part on a no-compromises approach to leftist authoritarians in Latin America.

He was an architect of Mr. Trump’s previous policy toward Venezuela, a so-called maximum pressure campaign that involved broad sanctions on the country’s vital oil industry and support for a young legislator, Juan Guaidó, who claimed to be the country’s interim president.

The approach failed to oust Mr. Maduro, who labeled Mr. Guaidó a U.S. puppet, and some analysts argue that it even strengthened the autocrat, showing that he could withstand an all-out offensive from the world’s most powerful nation.

But Ms. Machado believes this moment is different. Mr. Maduro is financially broken, she said, has alienated key allies like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and has lost so much public support that he has been forced to launch his most brutal repression campaign yet to stay in power.

Perhaps even more relevant, the Venezuelan people, she said, were now largely united behind a democratically elected president, Mr. González.

Ms. Machado has yet to speak to either Mr. Rubio or Mr. Waltz after their nominations, but said that their teams and hers were in “permanent contact.”

While many analysts say the recent election laid bare Mr. Maduro’s weaknesses, few believe the autocrat, who is being investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and could face arrest if ousted, has much incentive to leave.

“She says, ‘Maduro has no choice, he has to negotiate,’” said Phil Gunson, an analyst with International Crisis Group who has been based in Venezuela for more than two decades. “I think he does have a choice, and his choice is to remain in power.”

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Maduro characterized the U.S. president as imperialist enemy No. 1. But in the days since Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Maduro has tried to curry favor, publicly expressing hope that the two could work together.

Mr. Maduro clearly needs the United States to lift sanctions, while Mr. Trump, who has vowed to undertake mass deportations, could use the Venezuelan leader’s help in making good on his promise.

Speaking recently on one of his talk shows, Mr. Maduro called for a new moment of “win-win” relations.

It is unclear if the Maduro government knows Ms. Machado’s location.

“It’s difficult to believe they don’t know,” said Laura Dib, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“My read is that they know the political cost of imprisoning her,” Ms. Dib went on, “and instead they are betting on wearing her down.”

Many opposition leaders have come and gone in Venezuela over the years; few have built as broad a coalition as Ms. Machado. The eldest daughter in a prominent steel business family, she has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.

In 2002 she founded a voter rights organization, Súmate, which pushed unsuccessfully to oust Mr. Chávez through a recall vote. Súmate received U.S. funding.

It is only recently, after an overwhelming victory in a primary race in 2023, that Ms. Machado emerged as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. When Mr. Maduro’s government barred her from running in the general election, she managed to get Mr. González on the ballot in her stead.

On the campaign trail, she was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration.

“María!” her followers shouted, before falling into her arms.

In hiding these days, she wakes up alone, cooks and ponders the future of the country alone. Her three adult children live abroad; it is unclear when she will see them again. When she appears in videos shared online, she uses a blank white background, an effort, perhaps futile, to conceal her location.

Ms. Machado declined to say whether she even could go outside. “It’s a difficult test,” she said of isolation.

Mr. González, now in Spain, has focused on pushing their cause in meetings with European leaders.

In the interviews, Ms. Machado’s voice often quickened to a near-panic pace, and she expressed frustration that some nations were not doing more to isolate Mr. Maduro.

“We Venezuelans did everything the international community asked of us,” she said, a reference to the millions of people who risked retaliation to vote for her movement. “Now it’s time for the international community to do its part.”

Nearly 2,000 people have been imprisoned in a post-election crackdown by the Maduro government, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal. Among them are some of Ms. Machado’s closest advisers. At least two people have died after being taken into custody and another two dozen people were killed amid protests just after the July vote. The youngest, Isaías Fuenmayor, was just 15.

That so many people are suffering after supporting her weighs heavily.

“How many more deaths?” she asked, her voice rising. “How many more disappearances?”

(Over the weekend, the Maduro government released 131 prisoners detained since July’s election, according to Foro Penal.)

In calling on Mr. Trump to help restore her nation’s democracy, Ms. Machado is appealing to a U.S. president-elect who still refuses to recognize the result of an election he lost in his own country in 2020.

But Ms. Machado said she is also emphasizing that pushing out Mr. Maduro is in the U.S.’s interest “in terms of hemispheric security,” she said. Mr. Maduro is a major ally of Russia, Iran and China.

Asked how long she can remain in hiding, Ms. Machado said that she was “working to make it as short as possible,” and hoped that all Venezuelans would soon be “reunited in freedom.”

“But I am willing to do what has to be done,” she said, “for as long as it takes to assert the truth and popular sovereignty.”

Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.